


perfect day (you just keep me hanging on)

by icemachine



Category: Doom Patrol (TV)
Genre: Gen, this is set in the time that passed between episodes 14 and 15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 09:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20132872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icemachine/pseuds/icemachine
Summary: This: the ability to be alone, by himself in tranquility, without the fear of this cruel world ending.OH, but he’s never alone. That’s the thing about having someone else living inside of your body. Someone is always there for you. Someone always needs you.





	perfect day (you just keep me hanging on)

**Author's Note:**

> so basically if i remember correctly in 1x15 we see that keeg and larry had been working on being apart from each other during the 6 months that passed off screen before that episode. this is my idea of what went on during that time.
> 
> title is from perfect day, the song that played over the ant farm patch scene at the end of 1x06.

Larry is trying to find serenity in the word 'deserve'. It's difficult, searching for meaning in a concept once weaponized

(you don't deserve this)

(you deserve to burn)

(I deserve all of my pain)

to destroy. 

Larry is also trying to find a way to claw himself into the present; hearing the Chief's confession sent him back into the webbed hellfire that he has known for ninety-five years. He almost made it out, after John. After John. But apparently the power above seems to think he deserves the pain---

The apartment is small, and Cliff wanted to stay with him. 

Cliff wanted to be with them.

Cliff decided that Jane needed him more than Larry and Rita, and left.

Vic had to go back to being Cyborg.

So: the apartment is small. It fits the two of them perfectly; they are also small, a feeling of insignificance enveloping their minds and hopes. Will he ever be anything but small? Rita is the world. Rita has the globe spinning on her finger. She doesn't know it. Rita has him, always, but she will never see herself the way Larry sees her: a light born from ash, a fallen soul climbing their way back to the top; in other words, as whole.

If Larry could be anything, any concept, it would not be 'deserving'. It would be 'comforting'.

He sleeps on their couch. It isn't a very pleasant place of rest, but it is what he deser---

Larry helps Rita find a job. Someone has to bring in money. She says that the children she teaches are nice enough, that their disinterest in acting is shameful, but they're nice enough. He remembers being that young---

He remembers.

He remembers the torture, that the Chief allowed. It wasn’t just him; they tortured the Spirit. His most recent visit to the ANT Farm elicited a spiral. They wanted to  _ use  _ it, as if the Spirit was a weapon or an object. As if the Spirit wasn’t a living, sensitive being, like everyone else.

No. They weren’t living, or sensitive, or human. They were automatons, driven by a muddled hivemind of fear, hatred, violence… and Larry  _ let  _ it happen. His torture was deserved—

_ no— _

_ wait— _

but he cannot make peace with the fact that his cowardice hurt yet another being.

Larry excuses himself to the lake at midnight; at first it is solely a way out, an escape plan from the confinement—he is always being confined—

The water begins to glow underneath the moon, and tonight the moon seems unusually large, unusually hopeful.

Has he ever had this? This: the closest thing to peace and quiet he can grasp. This: the ability to look at the stars and the moon and not feel the aftermath of the plane on his skin like a phantom of loss. He was up there, once. It was beautiful. When he looked back to Earth, he was free from himself. This: the ability to be alone, by himself in tranquility, without the fear of this cruel world ending?

_ OH, but he’s never alone. That’s the thing about having someone else living inside of your body. Someone is always there for you. Someone always needs you. _

Larry’s chest begins to glow, faint moving up to an intense rumbling of light;  _ moonlight,  _ he thinks, it’s like moonlight, like Larry has finally become something ethereal, like he can be good.

Moonlight, he thinks. The spirit, and the moonlight, as one.

“Hey,” he breathes. “You like this too? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

An exit; Larry is thrust back against the bench he’s sitting on. That’s going to hurt tomorrow, but he deserves i—

The spirit sits down next to him. It does not need to sit, he notes, but it’s turning towards the water, eyes transparently moving upwards, upwards, upwards into the skies.

One.

Does the spirit miss it? Whatever it had, up there?

Two.

Does it ever yearn for its old life, before the tainting of L—

before it found Larry?

Three.

Does the spirit ever feel—-

* * *

“Larry,” says Rita. “Where were you last night?”

_ His first instinct is to lie. _

_ His second instinct is to be ashamed of his first instinct.  _

“I was just out taking a walk,” he responds. Milk, eggs, baking mix, pancakes. He can’t eat them without killing everyone in the vicinity, but Rita can. This is what he focuses on for the next several minutes; not the spirit, not the lake, not his pit of dread. Only pancakes. For Rita. For Rita.

“For two hours?” A glass-shattering pitch. He feels awful, immediately, for leaving her alone.

He flips them.

“Yeah, uh… I don’t know. I just wanted to be alone, I guess. I didn’t know I was gone that long.”

“Well, I worried about you. Tell me next time you’re going out. Or leave a note, or something, just… please.”

She’s trying to keep herself collected, but Larry can sense the anxiety in her voice. God.  _ God,  _ he’s so—he should’ve known—he can’t leave Rita by herself—is he even deserving of her worry—

He flips the pancakes again. They are burnt, completely inedible.

* * *

But Larry can’t help himself. The sun is setting, the sky is a poem of color: peach, violet, organ pink.

_ Rita, _

_ I’m going out again. It shouldn’t be too long. Don’t worry about me, just have fun tonight, okay? _

_ —Larry. _

He wants to touch the water. He almost does. He almost ruins the scene, almost drains it of its life;  _ if he leaks radiation— _

Larry, for once, can restrain himself from doing something forbidden. That has to mean something, that has to mark some idea of progress.

He still hurts from being forced against the bench. He knows that it didn’t mean to hurt him, but aches anyway, in his lower back and inside—

inside of him—

inside of everything—

that—

he is.

“If you’re going to leave me like that again,” he says, unholy mix of pain-laughter, “at least be more careful next time.”

Another highlight in his chest, the meat of his heart lighting up bright blue. With every heartbeat, with every movement, the spirit carries itself in his body, the spirit pulses on inside of him, always close, always there. Only showing its presence on the inside through sky color.

He spent years buried in resentment. Why? Because it ruined his life? Larry had ruined his life long before he met the spirit. The spirit only gave him a way out.

Somehow he knows that the glow is an apology.

“You know,” he says, the spark of an idea. “Do you think we’d make it? If we tried being apart again?”

The glowing immediately stops.

“I don’t want you to be… stuck in me for eternity just because I might die. You deserve a chance to be out. I can’t imagine it being comfortable in there.”

Slow, gentle—

_ one two three _

—he watches the spirit exit his body, 

_ four _

instead of pain he feels  _ peace  _ radiate—radiate— _ radiate  _ through him as he watches the spirit leave and fly and fly and fly and they can do this and

_ five— _

* * *

Five seconds. He stopped counting somewhere around five seconds. It has been weeks and weeks and months and months and they can only get to five seconds.

Larry is smart enough to bring a stopwatch, this time. They’re going to try for ten seconds. They’re going to keep trying. He’s going to find a way to make this work.

After dropping Rita off at the school, he wanders back to the lake. It is a long walk; he takes it in as he moves, every aspect of nature that he missed while they isolated themselves in the Manor. 

_ The Chief,  _ he thinks, and feels sick.  _ The Chief deserved what he got. He deserves the loneliness he has. Rita, Cliff, Jane, the Spirit—they all suffered directly because of him. Larry suffered, too, but he— _

_ He didn’t deserve it. _

_ He deserves this: a new life, with Rita and away from the man that ruined him. A life where he can walk through the world’s beautiful sights. A world where he is starting to find a way to be comfortable with himself. It is slow, but progress is being made. _

The spirit is Larry, and Larry is the spirit, two sides of a perpetually spinning coin. If the spirit didn’t deserve the torture, neither did Larry. The coin continues to spin. Larry continues to spin. The earth continues its celestial movement. The spirit remains in him, waiting. Just waiting, now.

  
  


_ Um,  _ he whispers, starting the stopwatch.  _ Negative Spirit… release.  _

  
  



End file.
